Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Thursday August 14, 2008 @09:16AM
from the lookit-all-them-wires dept.

hardsky submitted thrilling news about everyone's favorite interconnect cable by saying "USB 3.0 is set to deliver data-transfer speeds of up to 5Gb/s, initially over tweaked connectors and wiring and, later, over optical links."

Intel has provided chipset makers with a draft specification for a USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller Interface (XHCI), making good a promise it made a couple of months ago.

I thought we had a standards body that would release such a spec to developers. This development in my opinion, might have other chip makers release a "renegade USB 4.0" promising new features and the like.

Question is; is it up to manufacturers to think of ideas, name them and release these to the general public? What's up with IEEE Standards group, whose global standards include Biomedical and Healthcare, Nanotechnology, Information Technology and Information Assurance among others?

It will be interesting to see if USB 3.0 relies on the processor as much as the USB 2.0. This has led to firewire (400mbps) outperforming USB 2.0 (480mbps) in real world tests. In todays multicore world this may be non-issue on most machines by the time it ships. In a way I hope USB 3.0 does perform well. I would be OK with firewire going away if Firewire 3200 is outperformed by USB 3.0 without hogging to many clock cycles.

In theory, you could take two SATA 3GB drives and put them in a dedicated box that treated them as a software-driven RAID-0. That would give you peak theoretical data transfer of 6Gb/sec, but that's likely to happen only if you hit the drives' on-board caches. Connect that to your box using USB 3.0.

Of course, I'd probably prefer 1Gb/sec Ethernet, so I could see the data from my network not just one machine.

Seriously though, widespread use of the full bandwidth will probably not show up until 6-12 months after this hits the market. But it will come. It will be a competitor to eSATA.

Very simple. Use an odd number of contacts plus shield, +5V on the center contact, GND on the shield, each differential data connection symmetrical around the center contact. Plugging that in the wrong way will only reverse the polarity on the differential signals, which isn't a problem.

That's fine if people are trying to express "standard" or "normal" aka boring stuff.

If you are trying to communicate unusual meanings to somebody else, it doesn't work so well if you are sloppy.

On Slashdot I'm expecting the discourse to be on a higher level than "Me hungry. Want food", and that at least some people here will post stuff that is out of the ordinary and hopefully interesting.

In such a case, in addition to figuring out whether the writer made a mistake in spelling, grammer, you also have to figure out whether the writer made a mistake in reasoning, or is trying to be funny, or is saying something really _different_, or is saying multiple things at the same time, or is just plain crazy, or whatever.

It's all very easy to parse if you only have to expect people to say boring stuff.